Edmund Spenser and Auto/Biographical Fantasies of Social Status

In the mid-sixteenth century, when Italian biographer Paolo Giovio was criticized for including negative details about his subjects, he responded by distinguishing between the history that he wrote and encomium, "which praises people with all banners spread … and which is silent regarding all the vices which often accompany even the most distinguished virtues" (qtd. in Zimmerman 43). In England a half-century later, Francis Bacon similarly emphasized the difference between "lives … well and carefully written" and "elegies and barren commemorations of that sort" (qtd. in Mayer and Woolf 1).

The differences between encomium and biography-as-history,¹ as well as the changing understandings of the goals and methods of life writing in early modern England, help to explain both the paucity of biographical detail on the poet Edmund Spenser and the type of details that we do have of his life. The idea that the lives of authors, not just statesmen and clergymen, were worth recording arose during the seventeenth century (Pritchard 144), so it is unsurprising that none of Spenser's late-sixteenth-century contemporaries thought to provide a fuller biographical account than the brief summary of his life provided by William Camden in 1615.

Spenser certainly did not have high enough social status to expect to become part of the historical record. In the stratified world of late-Elizabethan social rankings, Spenser had the legal status of "gentleman" from the time he received his bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1573. But that broad legal categorization does not account for the ways that an individual's social arc could decline or ascend within it. For a born gentlemen like Mr. Philip Sidney, illustrious family connections made it obvious to all that he would not remain merely a gentleman; he was knighted in 1583 and would have inherited titles as well if he had lived beyond 1586. For a man whose gentle status came from education, however, contemporaries saw a considerably less obvious arc: he might increase his reputed social status to the extent that his legal status would rise as well—if he were knighted, for example—or he could spend a lifetime perceived as merely a gentleman-by-education, the lowest rung of the ladder of social meanings attributed to the legal status "gentleman."

The perception that a poet's life did not merit inclusion in the historical record, however, leaves open the possibility that a poet might become the subject of that other type of life writing, encomium. I argue here that although Spenser did not have the power to change his legally defined social status, he worked diligently in his poetry and prose to create an impression of himself as having high status. In the first section of this article, I note that, in addition to arguing that poetry and nobility go hand-in-hand and emphasizing his relationships with powerful aristocrats, Spenser provides the sort of positive and status-enhancing details that would provide matter for a future encomiast to write his life. Thus, we might think of his comments about himself as more "auto-encomiastic" than autobiographical.

But because of the lack of a more complete, "biographical" record, seventeenth-century life writers on Spenser had little choice but to rely on Spenser's encomiastic details, sometimes fleshing them out with fantastic anecdotes that served to increase perceptions of Spenser's social status even further. In the second part of the article, I analyze how seventeenth-century writers worked with the biographical details that Spenser provided to create an impression of him as having social status higher than the mere "gentleman" he was entitled to legally. The Spenserian poets build upon Spenser's ideas on the ennobling power of poetry and the stories of Spenser's friendship with Sidney to make Spenser and Sidney the tutelary spirits of their own poetic community. Seventeenth-century biographers create an enhanced sense of Spenser's status largely by focusing on his relationships with powerful people, whether those relationships were warm, as with Sidney, or chilly, as with William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Significantly, only one seventeenth-century writer takes up...